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Ana Maria Nicholson, “Keith Haring,” “Bishop John Moore,” and “Tony Bennett” in the Center for the Holographic Arts Holocenter House on Governors Island (all photographs by the author for Hyperallergic)

Inside the Holocenter House, a group of contemporary artists experimenting with 3D illusions only revealed when you move before their frames are installed on the ground floor. They range from portraits of Keith Haring and entwined bodies of lovers by Anna Maria Nicholson to Ikuo Nakamura‘s “Fossils” of two people in bed emerging from a flat pane of glass. Upstairs are projection-based pieces that rotate each weekend as part of their Parallax series, which has included a montage of 3D images from inside the Long Island City Clock Tower by Maximus Clarke, and a spiked assemblage of mirrors bouncing back a projection like a fractured disco ball by Julian Bozeman.

Holograms are certainly one of the trippier art forms, even if they are still relatively obscure since their development in the 1960s. They’re contrasted at the Holocenter with an ongoing workshop and presentation series with the New York Stereoscopic Association. These explorations go into the history of 3D photography from the 19th to 21st century, with demonstrations of the earliest ways of turning two dimensions into an alternate reality. It’s not clear as of now if the Center for the Holographic Arts will have a permanent home after they leave Governors Island at the end of September, but with this pop-up there’s reason for hoping they’ll continue to concentrate on the medium, and how it connects to the history of art.